Are you embarking on a DIY job this bank holiday weekend? Perhaps you’ve already started but have bitten off more than you can chew? You wouldn’t be alone, new Which? research shows…
Our new research today shows that many of us take on DIY jobs that are actually beyond our capabilities – with over half of Which? Trusted traders surveyed, reporting being called in to fix jobs that have gone so badly wrong that they’re potentially dangerous.
Plumbing jobs are the most commonly abandoned by DIYers, as one plumber said: ‘As soon as water starts leaking, people will call in a professional.’
Sometimes jobs can turn out to be more complicated than DIYers expect – you often can’t see the extent of a problem until you start trying to fix it. Although some people simply shouldn’t be trusted with a tool kit.
Home improvement
I fall into the unskilled DIYer category. My husband has banned me from DIY home improvements, as my efforts don’t match up to his high standards. I’m letting down the sisterhood but I fear it may be in the genes.
My late father, despite being a remarkable man in many ways, had little talent for DIY. He wouldn’t mind me sharing the story of his most famous DIY failure – my sister’s Sindy House. Sindy was the UK version of Barbie, and had a range of accessories that were hugely popular in the 1980s, when we were small.
The Sindy House was designed to stand over a metre tall, with four floors and several different rooms. It came flat-packed, with multiple tiny pieces and – according to my father – incomprehensible instructions. After a lot of swearing, he managed to construct something structurally unsound, which listed like the leaning tower of Pisa.
Luckily for my sister and her Sindy dolls, there were professional builders working in our home at the time. So my father called the builders away from their actual job, and got all three of them working on the Sindy House instead.
He salvaged some pride from the fact they found its construction tricky, too – when telling the tale, his final line was always ‘…and it took them three hours to build the b***** thing!’
I’ve no idea what they charged but they did a good job, as our Sindy House stood tall for years.
Have you started a DIY project only to have to call in a professional to finish it? Or maybe you’re a home improvement whizz – what DIY project are you most proud of?